I’ve been advocating for musicians to take a political stance — even endorsing the “right” candidates.
This goes back to my time in a band in Indonesia in the late ’90s, during the final months of Suharto’s dictatorship. Our vocalist wrote all the political lyrics. After a long argument between the two co-founders, I gave in and backed his position. We were living through something real. Taking a side made sense.
After that, political activism and music stayed connected for me. I believed that better government meant a better environment for musicians and fans.
But that was then. I now live in the United States, where democracy isn’t under the kind of threat I witnessed in Indonesia. I’ve been here six years and lived through two very different administrations.
The first got bad fast. The Republican president’s handling of COVID was disastrous — and when Bay Area counties started shelter-in-place orders in March 2020, it hit musicians hard. No performances, no touring. Their main platform was gone.
After 2020, things gradually came back. Live music returned, and with it something that felt like relief for people who’d been kept apart for almost two years.
I leaned hard Democrat through all of it. Whatever the party did, I was with them. Then Biden announced he wasn’t running, and something shifted. What I was watching wasn’t really about voters. It was about power. It always is. Common people are not actually the point.
Fine. It’s politics.
But it made me realize I’d lost track of something. Musicians have what politicians will never have: direct access to people who trust them, across political lines and borders. And a lot of musicians are trading that away for a news cycle.
These are my arguments as of 08/11/2024. I’ll update this when I find new reasons to add.
Reach
A musician with liberal politics can still have MAGA fans. Through music, they can reach those fans on issues that get labeled “liberal” — women’s rights, the environment, LGBTQ rights — without triggering the wall that goes up the moment a candidate’s name appears.
These aren’t partisan issues. They’re human issues. How did protecting the environment become something only one party cares about? We all live on the same planet.
The moment a musician publicly endorses someone like Kamala Harris, those MAGA fans are gone. And the chance to reach them goes with them.
That’s not about being neutral. It’s about not becoming a campaign prop.
Across borders
Music can do something politics can’t. It crosses borders without carrying a flag.
Take Gojira, a French metal band that sings about environmental destruction. Their music reaches fans in Brazil — including conservative fans who voted for Bolsonaro — and it works on them in ways no direct political argument could. No need to endorse Bolsonaro’s opponent. No need to alienate his voters. Just the music, and the issue.
Staying candidate-agnostic isn’t a retreat. It’s a different kind of reach.
The divide is too wide
Desmond Tutu’s quote gets misused constantly: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Not endorsing a candidate isn’t neutrality. There are bigger things at stake than getting any particular person elected — starting with whether people can think for themselves at all.
The political divide right now is so deep I’m not sure it can be closed.
The ones who benefit from that divide are politicians and money. Not regular people. Musicians could be one of the few forces capable of pulling things back together — but not by acting like campaign surrogates. By being musicians.